The highway clean-ups for Rice, MN and Lakeville, MN are set. The Rice clean-up will be on Sunday, April 25. We will start the clean up at 1:00 pm. Some will gather at noon for brunch at the Old Creamery Café in Rice, at 405 Main Street, just west of the stoplight on Highway 10. Contact Deb at 320-253-5422, or Steve Petersen at 651-484-9277. Steve can also be reached via email at achair@mnatheists.org.

While I am not in favor of atheist evangelists who, as atheist comedienne Paula Poundstone joked, would go door-to-door with a book full of blank pages, I am in favor of us doing more to meet the second goal of our organization: Educating the public about atheism.

Mark your calendars: the end of the world is coming. No, not the literal demise of the planet, but the end of civilization as we’ve come to know it. To be precise, the end is coming on April 23rd of this year. That’s actually the latest possible date; it could come even sooner.

The March public meeting featured local author Mike Davis speaking about how to use the Bible in discussions with Christian believers. Davis noted that most atheists steer wide of the Bible in such discussions, because they feel that they do not know it very well. Davis claimed that very few Christians have ever read the Bible critically, so pointing out contradictions can be an effective approach to undermine the Bible’s credibility.

Existentialism, as defined and described by Jean-Paul Sartre, is a lucid, compelling account of what it means to live a meaningful life in a world devoid of ultimate meaning. His famous dictum “existence preceded essence” says it all: by accepting the fact of our existence and by acting appropriately on it, one can fashion an identity far truer than the one imposed by religion, the state, or other presumptive authorities.